Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Do you ever wish we’d kept on with it?” she asked Jim.

  “What?”

  “Traveling. Going to rodeos.”

  “No,” Jim said. “Why?”

  “I guess I just feel like a drive,” Patsy said. “I mean a long drive.”

  “You sure didn’t like it much at the time.”

  “Didn’t I? I guess I didn’t. I remember some of the mornings as being nice.”

  “Remember the first summer we were married?” Jim asked, apropos of nothing.

  Patsy tried to, but couldn’t very well. The first months they were married had no reality for her, not even in memory. When she stared at the present, at the room and at the man and the baby who scarcely knew each other, she felt only apprehension, and time after time her mind left the magazine and went back to the time when she and Jim had been alone together on the long roads in the Ford.

  Not much later her apprehensions were justified. The present forced itself upon her—Jim was horny. A day of watching her wander around in a bathing suit had whetted his appetite. The night before he had been hasty; but he became the opposite. It seemed to Patsy that after years of haste he had picked that night to settle down to a leisurely and rather studious consideration of her body. She could not have been less in the mood to be played with. It made her sick. The worldliness she had credited herself with suddenly deserted her; she felt shamed in so many ways that she could not even feel hostility. She didn’t want to be naked, didn’t want to be touched, and was afraid Davey would wake up. The shame she felt disarmed her. She didn’t want Jim to know he was making her sick, though he certainly knew she was not responsive. “We’ve got out of touch,” he said lightly, afterward. He said it nicely. They had got out of touch, but it was something he was sure could be remedied in a few days.

  He slept but Patsy could not. She was too low. After a while she began to feel very strange. She didn’t want to stay in the bed with him. She went to the bathroom but didn’t turn on the light. She felt hurt, but she also felt sorry for Jim. It was all her own fault. But when she stood in front of the darkened mirror, in which she could only see flickers of her image, her mind began to spin. Confusion and hopelessness almost overcame her; she felt herself spiraling helplessly, felt that her marriage was over. She must take Davey and leave. She went to the door and looked out across the empty courtyard of the motel to see where she might go, or if anyone was there to help her or hold her back. No one was there. The moon swam in the empty pool. She went back into the room, still swirling in her mind. If she were dressed and packed she might leave, but she couldn’t turn on lights and dress and pack. Toys and baby clothes were strewn everywhere. She couldn’t go, but neither could she get back in bed. She felt terribly tight, as if she needed to cry, but her eyes were tearless and even the inside of her head felt dry.

  She bent over Davey’s bed and made sure his pen was secure, and then slipped on her robe and tiptoed down the concrete steps to the courtyard. She pulled a pool chair back into the shadows and sat on it, her feet tucked under her. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She chewed nervously on a fingernail, something she never did. Nothing was at an end; that was the awful thing. She didn’t know how to bring anything to an end. She remembered what Jim had said: They were out of touch. What could put them back? So many things would have to change before they could be put back; she didn’t know how to change them, nor did Jim. He didn’t even know what the things were, neither did she, not very clearly. Perhaps they had never been in touch—she didn’t want to think about it. She was grateful when a couple walked along the sidewalk. She could listen to their voices for a minute. It was Sonny and the girl with the marvelous tan. They didn’t see her. The girl had her arm around Sonny’s waist. They went into a room and Patsy was alone again. She felt such a dread of the future that it made her queasy.

  Then she thought of Joe. It was not very late. She went to his door and his light was still on so she knocked. “Who goes?” he asked.

  “Me.” It surprised her that her voice sounded normal and not like the voice of a madwoman.

  Joe had been lying on his bed smoking, reading Herzog, and intermittently watching a Lana Turner movie. Patsy’s face startled him. She had been happy, chatty, and serene-looking during the afternoon. But her face was pale and she looked sick.

  “What is it, honey?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said and shrugged hopelessly. “What were you reading?”

  He seemed unable to remember, the sight of her face had thrown him off so. “Ah, Bellow,” he said. “More or less for professional reasons. We’re trying to decide if a movie can be made of this. Do you want a drink?”

  “I don’t think so.” The brightness of the room depressed her. She felt it was a mistake to have come. “You were watching a movie,” she said.

  Joe saw that the room depressed her. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. “You have a caged look. Let’s sit outside for a while.”

  “I feel caged,” she said. “It’s no one’s fault, don’t sympathize with me. I made the cage myself and it’s not fair for me to have sympathy.”

  “Let’s go outside, anyway.”

  “I don’t want you to let me cry on your shoulder,” she said, but she followed him out. “You probably have problems of your own, and they’re probably worse than mine. You probably don’t deserve yours.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, sweetheart,” he said in a voice so kind and concerned that it turned the dust in her head and bosom to water, to such a flood that she could not see where she was going. She stubbed her toe painfully on the leg of an iron table. Joe could not quite reach her and she almost stumbled into the pool, blind with tears. But she found a chair and sat in it crying, and he pulled one near and sat smoking and watching the pool. After a while he fumbled in his pocket but found no handkerchief.

  “That’s me,” he said. “I was never a ladies’ man, as you can see. Always poorly equipped, never have a handkerchief, always on the wrong side of whoever I’m with when there’s a door to be opened.”

  Patsy wanted to chide him but her throat was not in operation. She kept crying.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t fall in the pool,” he said. “I would have leapt in after you and we might both have drowned. I always see black humor in these situations.”

  “Do you mind if I talk while you cry?” he asked a little later.

  “No, but I’m stopping.” She was, but her voice remained unsteady.

  “It would be nice if it were an ocean instead of a swimming pool,” Joe said. “Primordial emotions sort of go with the ocean.”

  “It wasn’t so primordial,” Patsy said. “I don’t know what it was. I’m going to look awful in the morning.

  “I broke my toenail,” she added unhappily. “You sounded so sympathetic you started me crying.”

  “Well, I’m naturally on your side, even if I don’t know who the battle’s with. Cheer up a little.”

  “Please get me a Coke. My stomach’s unsettled and I think my toenail’s bleeding.”

  She sipped the Coke while he went to his room and got a drink and came back. He was reticent—almost too reticent. Patsy found herself hoping he would ask questions. If he would, she might find answers to them. She thought of telling him that she had a lover, but, as with Emma, she couldn’t form the sentence that would expose her. “I guess something’s gone terribly wrong in my life,” she said finally, but even that sounded pretentious. She had ceased feeling so bad. Thin white clouds were passing overhead, rapid, lovely in the dark sky. The sense of constriction left her.

  “You were happily married,” she said. “You told me so. How did it happen? Or maybe you don’t want me asking.”

  “I wouldn’t mind telling you if I knew,” he said bemusedly. “As near as I can remember it was mostly luck. I tend to be simplistic about these things. We met by accident and happened to get on beautifully.”

  “You’re not much help,” she said. “Except as
a shoulder to cry in the vicinity of. Tell me the secret of it all, so I can be happy.”

  “You know me,” he said. “Besides being simple-minded I’m a lecher. Maybe lechery is the secret.”

  “No, no, no,” Patsy said. “Don’t say that. You’ll drive me to despair. Sex is not supposed to be overemphasized in marriage any more. What about stability and sharing duties and all that?”

  “I’ve never known two people to keep one another happy by taking turns dishwashing,” he said, as if that were the end of that.

  Patsy felt very discouraged. Her legs felt heavy as stone. Joe noticed and did his best.

  “Don’t be so sad,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out with Jim it will work out with somebody else. You’re in splendid shape. Lots of good fellows around. For god’s sake, don’t mope. You’re too pretty to mope.”

  She stood up. It occurred to her that Davey could have rolled out of his pen. “You don’t make me feel very dutiful,” she said, “but thanks for being on my side.”

  “It’s no accomplishment. Leaving tomorrow?”

  “So far as I know.” When she reached the second level he was still standing by the pool, and she waved.

  Jim was awake when she stepped into the room. His bed light was on. He looked at her hostilely and she felt discovered—seen through.

  “Oh, hi,” she said.

  “Been to see your friendly marriage counselor?” he asked.

  “I was just talking to Joe awhile. Don’t pick a fight now, please. Please don’t.”

  “Why were you talking to him at this hour?”

  “I felt wretched. It isn’t so late.”

  “It isn’t my fault you felt wretched,” Jim said. “You didn’t have to. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I didn’t accuse you. I can feel wretched on my own hook, can’t I? I know it was my fault.”

  “You think it’s my fault, though.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “Please don’t be angry with me now, Jim.”

  “Technically I didn’t do anything wrong but I still lack some sort of generosity of spirit or something so that you become wretched when I touch you, right?”

  “Well, you’re lacking it right now,” she said with a flicker of vehemence. “I asked you not to pick a fight. I’d like to try and go to sleep.”

  “I’m not keeping you awake,” he said, flicking off the light. “Where I wish you’d go is to a psychiatrist. Maybe we could find out what’s wrong with you sexually.”

  Patsy had been about to get in bed, but she stopped. “Listen,” she said. “Shut up. I know I wasn’t any barrel of fun tonight but there’s nothing wrong with me sexually. I can not be in the mood. You were out of the mood for six goddamn months, until you happened to be in that whorehouse in Richmond. So maybe I got cut off, I don’t know. You just be careful what you say to me.”

  “Big deal,” Jim said. “What will you do, run back down and cry in Joe’s arms? I know we were cut off. I was trying my best to turn us back on.”

  “You just tried on the wrong night,” she said. “If you’ll forget it and shut up, it will be okay. I didn’t do anything so bad, either. I just got blue and went and sat by the pool awhile.

  “I do not need a psychiatrist,” she added flatly.

  “Well, okay,” he said. “Maybe you need a gynecologist, I don’t know. I just know we need something.”

  “I was turned off!” she said. “I didn’t want sex! Shut up before you ruin us forever. Can’t you understand? Just shut up. Talking makes it worse.”

  She took a pillow and pulled the bedspread off the bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t sleep in this bed tonight,” she said. “You go to sleep and let me alone. I’ll sleep all right.”

  “That’s childish,” he said. “Come on.”

  “No. You think I need nine thousand doctors. I won’t sleep with you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just talking.”

  “I told you not to talk,” she said.

  “Shit,” he said. “Come on, you can have the bed.”

  “Keep it. Go to sleep. I’m all right.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Be stubborn.”

  ‘I will.” She stayed on the floor, wrapped in the bedspread. She awoke so often that she could not tell if she had really been sleeping. There was a kind of vibrating silence in the room, as if Jim too were awake.

  When morning finally came and Davey was awake things improved. They all had breakfast together and were as polite and friendly as if the night had never happened. Both knew that it had, but they ignored the knowledge. Patsy called Roger Wagonner and he insisted that they visit; she decided it might be a good idea. She did not want to rush right back to Houston, to Hank. If she went back in the wake of such discouragement anything might happen. Her marriage ties might snap, and she didn’t want that, at least not on the basis of one bad night. They sat by the pool most of the morning in the bright sunlight. A few cheerful Californians sat around with them drinking Sprites and Frescas and joking about their hangovers. Jim took Davey in the water for a while and Davey loved it. Jim looked very blond and handsome and cheerful, and it seemed so right and so natural that the two of them were playing together that Patsy felt even less like returning to Houston. She knew she ought to think of some way to keep them together more. Soon they would not be able to help loving each other. But Jim was planning to go to California and leave them alone again. It irked her every time she thought about it. It was so inconsistent. He wanted them to love him but he wouldn’t stay around so they could try. Davey gurgled and yelled and after a while Joe Percy emerged, looking truly hung over. He was blinking and holding his sunglasses out before him like a shield.

  “Why don’t you put them on?” she asked.

  “I like to hold them out like this,” he said. “It gives me satisfaction.”

  “Put them on. I can’t bear to look at you when you’re in pain.”

  He put them on. “You look lovely again,” he said. “What became of your ravaged countenance?”

  “My toenail still hurts,” she said. “We’re going to a ranch this afternoon, Davey and I.”

  “A little thoughtless of you, to go off and leave us all at the mercy of Dixie.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With the director, but it’s nothing that’ll go two nights, if I know them. She’s a kind of Norman Vincent Peale of the boudoir, you know. She believes in everyone she likes absolutely, for a night or two. Then she disbelieves in them absolutely.”

  They chatted the morning away, and then Patsy went up and fed Davey and packed. She stopped at Joe’s door and said goodbye to him, and he kissed her on the cheek. A little later, at the airport, Jim kissed her lightly on the mouth as she held Davey. On the way to the airport and while waiting they had been polite; they had left things very vague, for fear of becoming heated. They talked of Davey and of the fall, skipping entirely the ambiguous weeks ahead. He was surprised that she had not seen more of the Duffins, told her to say hello to the Hortons, and didn’t mention Hank at all. On the plane she and Davey took a seat by the window. Jim was still standing by the flight gate, the wind of the plains blowing his hair and making him look happy and rakish. She tried to make Davey wave, but Jim had not spotted them. Davey was gurgling; he liked planes. Patsy tried to smile in response to the stewardesses’ appreciatory remarks, but she felt strange inside. There was her husband—they were going away from each other again. Then Jim turned and went back into the terminal, to do what, to go where, she really didn’t know. She was alone with Davey and didn’t really know where she was going, either, or what she was going to do. It was very lonely to be departing after such a short visit, with so little done and so little clear. They ought to be going somewhere together, though she didn’t know where; she could not much blame him for wanting to go without her after the way she had behaved. Then the plane went up. Davey grew very still, his head leaned back against he
r breastbone, between her breasts. His head was warm and he gripped one of her fingers. A little of the strange feeling went away. She talked to him and held him up so that he could see the small white clouds below them. Then she settled him back in her lap, his head where it had been, and looked out fairly calmly at the brown land and the clouds.

  13

  THE RANCH HOUSE TOO was without a baby bed. There were only two beds in the whole house. Roger gallantly offered her the use of his marriage bed, but Patsy declined and put Davey down for a nap on the bed in the guest room. He was very tired, and so was she. Once she had made him a kind of pen she took off her dress and lay across the bed in her slip, meaning to wait until she was sure he was asleep before she changed clothes. Though the heat outside was fearsome, the old high-ceilinged room was fairly cool and she too was soon asleep. Davey woke before her, knocked one side of his pen awry, and was in the process of falling off the bed when she awakened. She had been sleeping deeply and could not get herself in motion in time to catch him. His heels disappeared and she heard a loud bump, as of a small boy’s head hitting a floor. It terrified her and she grabbed him up and began trying to comfort him even before he began crying. He cried loudly for a bit, surprised and outraged. Patsy felt terribly guilty and strange and cried too, stroking Davey’s head with her fingers. The shock, the scare, the adrenalin mixed strangely in her with grogginess and a desire to go back to sleep. Her arms trembled.

  Fortunately Davey quieted down rather quickly. He looked for a time as if he felt the world had done him a bad turn for no good reason, but then he began to look cheerful again and Patsy felt enormously relieved. She had been imagining permanent brain damage but could not even find a bump, only a small red spot on his forehead. She looked out the window and saw Roger go into the barn. She changed Davey and put on her jeans and a shirt and retrieved Davey from the edge of the fireplace, where he had scooted himself. “Let’s go see some animals,” she said.